Class S is Lesbian Literature
I often see people point to Class S as an example of Japanese lesbophobia and talk about it like it's "pseudoromance" or some pure, fleeting phase of life that teenage girls are expected to grow out of. Frankly, I think this viewpoint is ignorant at best, and more often a form of Usamerican cultural chauvinism. "Our out and proud lesbian stories" vs. "Their homophobic lesbian stories" type deal.
Cultural differences in romantic and sexual expression aside (more on that later), Class S is unambiguously a form of lesbian storytelling. Hanamonogatari is essentially the foundational Class S text. The short stories in it date from 1916-1924. The author, Yoshiya Nobuko, was a woman who resisted the socially conservative expectations of a well-to-do family to get married off. She effectively had a common-law wife from 1923 until her death in 1973, and even formally adopted her as a daughter in 1957 to share many of the medical and legal privileges that a marriage would have granted them. Another one of her works, Two Virgins in the Attic, ends with a pair of schoolgirls explicitly deciding to live together as a couple. If you're going to tell me that a lesbian pioneer was actually lesbophobic, I am going to tell you that you are full of shit.
The truth of the matter is that Class S takes an oblique approach to lesbianism because of prevailing social conservatism and publishing censorship when the genre was developing. Take a moment to ask yourself why a lesbian author might focus on the ephemerality of lesbian relationships in boarding schools. It's not lesbophobia, it is getting your heart broken over straight girls treating you as practice, the cruelty of having your love denied as "just a phase" by school administators, the expectation that even something real will eventually be crushed by the social and financial pressures to marry. Thematically, it is attempting to treasure the beautiful moments in an otherwise soul-crushing adolescence.
What's more is that throughout the 1920s, it slowly became effectively impossible to write about lesbian relationships in a direct manner. Though Hanamonogatari was published during the (relatively) liberalized Taishō era, there was still a deep fixation on public morality, especially concerning womens' social roles. Schoolgirl relationships were a popular theme through the 1920s, and its popularity meant they stories increasingly attracted blame for lovers' suicides between schoolgirl couples. As such, the stories were often subject to formal obscenity/moral censorship and editorial interference aimed at discouraging these relationships in the first place.
Modern Class S is sort of cast in the mold of Maria-sama ga miteru (Marimite), which began serializing as a light novel in 1998. It follows many of the same conventions as Class S, though the author Konno Oyuki was apparently unaware of the genre until well after she started publishing. Instead, it was conceived as more of a counterpoint/parody of all-male casts in BL fiction, though I suspect Kanno eventually began incorporating some of the genre's themes into her work as the serialization went on. The relationships in Marimite, much like in Class S, range from girls' school situationships to mutually-reciprocated lesbian relationships. Marimite proved to be an incredibly popular franchise, and a lot of those working in yuri novels and manga today are influenced by it. Importantly: many, if not most, of those creators are women, writing about lesbian and queerplatonic relationships primarily for an audience of other women.
The idea that these stories were intended to highlight lesbian relationships as just a phase is taking a heterocentric interpretation/explanation of them at its word. And I suspect the reason this extremely general "explanation" finds traction is that projects Usamerican cultural values about what queer relationships and the stories about them should look like onto another culture. To a Usamerican, "authenticity" must actively reflect and affirm specific identities and relationship dynamics.
You see this attitude reflected in reductive purity tests that Western fandom tends to apply ("it's not a lesbian relationship if they don't kiss!"), debates over whether "subtext yuri" is "real" yuri, or wholesale transplanting of specific Usamerican lesbian relationship dynamics into a different culture with statements like "Japanese authors don't write enough butchfemme yuri". And when these supposed criteria for a "real" lesbian story aren't met, it is held up as an example of Japanese (internalized) lesbophobia. In reality, it is just wearing Usamerican cultural blinders.
If you actually read these stories, you will find that the writers are simply following a different set of storytelling conventions and have a different focus on which parts of a relationship they find compelling. It might be more subtle or require a closer reading of character interactions, but it's usually there, plain as day. If you need additional reassurance, that's a failure of your imagination, not theirs.
Am I going to argue that Japan is free from homophobia or that Class S or yuri is uniformly pro-lesbian? No. (Internalized) lesbophobia is everywhere. Corporate hets will trade on subtlety to deny a lesbian relationship exists. Writers, especially hets who are adapting a lesbian or queerplatonic work, can bring homophobic attitudes to the table with them. But distinguishing which is which requires you to at least make the effort to understand another culture's own standards before you filter them through your own. You cannot and should not make sweeping generalizations about a culture when you've put the barest minimum of effort into understanding it.
